Frankenstein: The Mother, the Daughter, and the
Monster

Paul Youngquist

Philological Quarterly, 70:3 (Summer 1991),
339-59

But to the girdle do the gods inherit
Beneath is all the fiends'.

-- Shakespeare

{339} Increasingly, and with considerable warrant, criticism
approaches Frankenstein as an instance of feminist
polemic. It is thus, in the words of one prominent critic, "Mary
Shelley's feminist novel" [Mellor], a
work that subverts patriarchal assumptions about politics and
science and counsels a gentler way of living.1 In artistic
terms, it declares a quiet kind of independence, for it
qualifies and completes prevailing masculine assumptions,
becoming what another critic calls a "vindication of the
imagination of woman" [Randel]
the fictive sequel to Mary Wollstonecraft's pathbreaking
polemic.2

In her journal entry of 21 October 1838, however, Shelley records the
following confession: "If I have never written to vindicate the
rights of women, I have ever befriended women when oppressed."3 She conjures
up the spirit of her mother's polemic to mark the limits of its
influence. Where Wollstonecraft defends abstract principle,
Shelley cultivates concrete affections. Her feminism appears
more intimate than her mother's. In crucial ways, she rejects
the ideals of A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman, working in Frankenstein
not so much to rehabilitate as more deeply to investigate the
feminine. To approach her novel from any but its own special
kind of feminist perspective is to overlook these aims and to
deprive Shelley of her deepest, most disturbing insights.

In keeping with the assumptions of Enlightenment tradition,
{340} Wollstonecraft
aspires beyond sex altogether. Her pervasive emphasis upon
reform in the education of women aims ultimately at restoring
their full -- and sexless -- humanity.4 British
culture, in her view, is guilty primarily of alienating its
female members from their human potential, reducing their
identity entirely to sex, which men define and control. The
obliging conduct of Wollstonecraft's female contemporaries
attests to the degeneracy of their minds, which she attributes
to "a false system of education, gathered from the books written
on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women
than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them
alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational
mothers" [Introduction
1].5
Wollstonecraft's assumptions allow her to vindicate even the
conventional roles of wife and mother, but only so long as they
liberate the human rationality that exists prior to any sexual
identity. The best feminism is an enlightened humanism;
Wollstonecraft subordinates the female to the human in order to
assert equality of reason and therefore right.

This position arises inevitably from her most fundamental
beliefs, most of which were commonplaces of the Enlightenment.
Throughout A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman, nature is the true standard of
value, and reason our human means of reading it. Hence the
necessity of a rational education: "Children cannot be taught
too early to submit to reason . . . for to submit to
reason is to submit to the nature of things, and to that God,
who formed them so, to promote our real interest" (155). Wollstonecraft's
critique lacks the cultural and historical sophistication that
characterizes today's feminism. She writes to return culture to
the rule of reason, for "if any class of mankind be so created
that it must necessarily be educated by rules not strictly
deducible from truth, virtue is an affair of convention" (85). A commitment to the
universality of reason underwrites her feminism, and because
women are rational creatures, their humanity is not, as men
would have it, reducible to sex: "I do earnestly wish to see
the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless when love
animates behavior" (57). Wollstonecraft's
utopia is an androgynous one in which sex becomes an issue only
where culture and biology meet, as for instance in the affairs
of love, or the imperatives of family. A feminism that sees
women as essentially different from men would be a betrayal of
this redemptive humanism, a crippling acceptance of the cultural
presumption that women, after {341} all, are only women. As
Wollstonecraft put it, "the desire of being always a woman is
the very consciousness that degrades the sex" (99).

Wollstonecraft's critique of prevailing cultural assumptions may
seem dated, particularly in its identification of rational with
natural order. But the kind of feminism it promoted was, in its
day, radical. So it is all the more important to realize that
Shelley swerves in Frankenstein away from the humane standard of
her mother's feminism. For her novel retreats from
Wollstonecraft's faith in reason to advance more bodily
imperatives. Shelley's hesitation fully to embrace that faith
appears clearest in the way she represents women. Several
feminist critics have noted -- with disappointment -- that the
novel's female characters seem vapid and bland. Barbara Johnson
calls them "beautiful, gentle, selfless, boring nurturers and
victims who never experience inner conflict or true desire" (7). Mary Jacobus is a bit less
stringent: "at best women are the bearers of a traditional
ideology of love, nurturance, and domesticity; at worst, passive
victims" (132). The easiest
way of explaining those brittle, embarrassing creatures is to
handle them as these critics and dismiss them as "victims." But
I want to understand why Mary Shelley, with her mother's
Vindication at hand, chooses pervasively to present women
in such unattractive terms.6

Shelley lacks her
mother's confidence that the fate of sex can be overcome. In
fact, as William Veeder suggests, "Mary cannot imagine life
without gender" (37). A remark she makes in a letter to Maria
Gisborne is in this regard illuminating: "My belief is --
whether there be sex in souls or not -- that the sex of our
[female] material mechanism makes us quite different creatures
-- better though weaker but wanting in the higher grades of
intellect."7
Interesting to note here is the emphasis upon the body -- the
material facts of sex -- and the way this physical difference
distinguishes women and men. Shelley quietly indicts a feminism
that denies what she takes to be the imperatives of the body.

In this she is not alone. It is one of the liabilities of
Enlightenment thought that the identification of human nature
with rationality minimizes the significance of bodily
existence. Alison M. Jagger's description of the "normative
dualism" inherent in what she calls "liberal feminism" has
important implications for Shelley's novel: "If individuals are
rational in the required sense, then physical structure and
appearance are unimportant. Just as {242} height and weight are
considered irrelevant to an individual's essential humanity, so
too are the physical characteristics such as race and sex
[my italics] that historically have been more controversial.
Liberal feminism is grounded squarely on an acceptance of this
traditional view" (37). It is just such a feminism that Shelley
sets out to critique in Frankenstein, for as we shall
see, her assessment of the feminine derives fundamentally from
the life of the body. One of Shelley's central tenets is that
her mother's feminism reduces the human to a rational corpse.

For Wollstonecraft appeals to reason as a means of minimizing
the imperatives of the body and its social misconstructions, but
Shelley denies reason the power to achieve so complete a
makeover. No character is more reasonable in
Frankenstein than the monster, and no character is more
cursed by the brute fact of its bodily existence.
Wollstonecraft, true to liberal fashion, maintains that the
value placed upon physical appearance is primarily a social
construct; an ideology of beauty allows women to endure and even
encourage their oppression by men: "taught from their infancy
that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the
body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its
prison" (44). If beauty
is the curse, then reason is the cure, and liberal feminism
becomes a kind of cultural therapy. But Shelley confounds
Wollstonecraft's critique of enculturated beauty by insisting
upon the bodily ugliness of Frankenstein's creature. She
implicitly inverts the values of her mother's argument by
reconstructing female beauty as male ugliness. If such
qualities were social constructs, then the monster, as a male in
a male dominated social order, should be able to overcome them.
But the facts of his body antedate that order and prohibit a
rational assimilation to it. The monster's main obstacle to
social relations is his appearance; his extreme deformity
inspires revulsion. In his relations with mankind he expects
perpetual frustration: "The human senses," he maintains, "are
insurmountable barriers to our union" [2.9.2].8 Try as he may, the monster cannot
reason his way out of the fate that his body forces upon him.

And this fate haunts him from the first. Immediately after the
monster's creation, Frankenstein awakens to an unanticipated
horror:

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how
delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I
had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I
had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful Great {343}
God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and
arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing;
his teeth of a pearly whiteness, but these luxuriances only
formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed
almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they
were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. (52)

Frankenstein's revulsion at his creature's appearance originates
beyond enculturated norms. The conjunction of the words
"Beautiful! Great God!" add a primordial resonance to
Frankenstein's disgust. He responds viscerally to his
creature's appearance, which defies accommodation to social
norms of ugliness and beauty.

All who encounter the monster, whatever their background, react
the same way. Rude villagers shriek and chase him from their
midst, pelting him with "stones and many other kinds of missile
weapons" (101). The young
republican, little William Frankenstein, responds to the
creature's appearance with his brother's revulsion: "Ugly
wretch! . . . Hideous monster!" (139). The intrepid and
bourgeois Walton, prepared for the sight by Frankenstein's
detailed narrative, is shocked by the monster's indescribable
form, its "loathsome and appalling hideousness . . .
uncouth and distorted in its proportions" (216). Frankenstein's creature,
rational and compassionate as he is, finds himself trapped in a
body that inspires disgust. He even experiences this reaction
himself when, in a moment that parodies Eve's acquisition of
self-consciousness in Paradise
Lost, he sees his own reflection for the first time:

how was I terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool!
At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I
who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully
convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was
filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and
mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal
effects of this miserable deformity. (109)

Shelley is careful to situate the monster's revulsion
prior to his acquisition of language, diminishing the
possibility that it originates in purely cultural assumptions.
In fact the monster sees language as a means of rationally
transcending the fate his body inflicts. He longs to discover
himself to the De Laceys but lacks the words that would allow
him to bypass sensation and appeal directly to reason: "I ought
not to make the attempt until I had first become master of their
language, which knowledge might enable me to make them overlook
the deformity of my figure" (109). But once having learned
to speak, the monster learns also that no language can cover his
bodily deformity. His moving attempt to reason away his
hideousness in the presence of the {343} blind patriarch of the
De Lacey family fails because the facts of his bodily existence
resist all idealizing. At the monster's reasoned and eloquent
appeal the old De Lacey, in the words of Frankenstein, exclaims
"Great God!" (131), and Felix
rushes in to end it violently.

For Shelley, body is fate; all idealizings, cultural and
personal, liberal and feminist, mask more profound -- and
irrational -- imperatives. If it is ugliness that fuels the
monster's social exclusion, it is beauty that drives his
revenge: he destroys what he cannot possess. Hence the
inadequacy of Wollstonecraft's arguments that reason is natural
and beauty mere ornament. They fail to take into account the
bodily imperatives that condition all human lives, male
and female. In Frankenstein, Shelley takes up the
greater task of investigating the fate of the body and its
uneasy assimilation to social norms, a task that forces her to
swerve away from the "liberal feminism" of her mother toward a
more essentialist position based in bodily imperatives.

This is not to say that she has no interest in feminist issues,
the status of women in patriarchal society, for instance, or the
civilized dissociation of a masculine public world from a
feminine domestic one.9 A critique of these oppressive
circumstances runs throughout her narrative and gives it the
social urgency that feminists have recently begun to recover.10 In
comparison with Wollstonecraft's feminism, however, Shelley
falls short. Her frank naturalism qualifies the plausibility of
her mother's exhortations to an androgynous utopia.11 The monster
demonstrates openly the implied imperatives of corporeal life:
there can be no transcendence of sex, no rationalist utopia
oblivious to the body. All social orders are sublimations of an
irreducibly bodily existence. A liberal feminism that restricts
itself to the rational analysis of enculturated norms does not
plumb the depths of human being. And because so many of
Shelley's feminist critics are intellectually the heirs of
Wollstonecraft, their appropriations of Frankenstein
remain oblivious to its critique of liberal assumptions.12 Beneath the
feminism of Frankenstein is to be found a subtler
meditation upon human suffering and the way it shapes social
distinctions of morality and gender.

Consider again the plight of Frankenstein's monster. It is easy
to view him as the embodiment of a fantasy of aggression against
women, a fantasy that sustains the oppressive order of
patriarchal culture and ensures, if necessary by murder, the
subordination {345} of the female. But this view explains
neither the revulsion he inspires in other characters (including
all the women in the novel) nor the fascination he awakens in
ourselves. I think a clue to these powerful responses appears
in the spontaneous outbursts of Frankenstein and De Lacey upon
first recognizing the monster for what he is. Both are in some
sense father figures, and both exclaim "Great God" [1.4.1, 2.7.10]. Their disgust is so
complete that it provokes a spontaneous turn to the divine.
What is going on here I believe, is a reenactment of an archaic
psychological drama. The primal revulsion that the monster
inspires resembles what Paul Ricoeur has maintained is a
primitive and visceral disgust aroused by impurity. Reenacting
a drama of defilement in the context of a demythologized
literary narrative, Shelley plunges beneath the surface of the
civilized to examine vestigial impulses that shape its
enculturated norms. If the monster's body determines its fate,
it also presents the social order that reviles it with a
fearsome image of impurity.

Ricoeur has suggested that the "primitive dread" awakened by the
impure "deserves to be interrogated as our oldest memory."13 It is the
subjective component of the experience of defilement, which
originates in objective infectious contact with something deemed
impure, unclean. Such defilement functions symbolically,
representing an evil so virulent that it requires divine
vengeance to put things right. Dread of impurity necessitates a
purifying avenger; primordial disgust needs a purge from above.
Little wonder, then, that when Frankenstein and De Lacey fully
awaken to the monster's deformity they respond in specifically
religious terms. The monster confronts them with an impurity so
complete that it cannot be assimilated to civilized order and
reactivates instead a primitive dread.

For the monster has all the marks of a defiled being. He
possesses "a figure hideously deformed and loathsome" (115) that makes him "an object
for the scorn and horror of mankind" (136). In his hideousness he is
an outcast, excluded from all human communities as much for the
revulsion he inspires as the appearance he presents. Even
Frankenstein, as his monster charges, turns away as from a
contaminated being: "Accursed creator! Why did you form a
monster so hideous that even you turned away from me in
disgust?" (126). Mary
Shelley indicates repeatedly that this disgust is a visceral
reaction to profound and indelible impurity. The monster comes
to life in Frankenstein's {346} "workshop of filthy creation"
(50), and his hideous anatomy
is a defiled parody of the human, a "filthy type" (126) of its creator's.

This emphasis upon uncleanness, impurity, filth, suggests
that the monster manifests for Shelley an archaic symbolism of
defilement -- erupting in the midst of a civilized order. Our
own cinematic representations of the monster as an overgrown
grotesque of somewhat decomposed appearance make the same
point: this "monster" is
an admonition (Latin "monere"), a living symbol of impurity.
Frankenstein authenticates this symbolism when he denounces his
creature as "the wretch, the filthy demon" (73), a phrase that freights the
whole symbolism of defilement. As "wretch" the monster is
literally an outcast. Why? Because he is "filthy." And to
what end? That divine vengeance may purge the world of this
unclean "demon." The visceral revulsion that the monster
awakens attests to an archaic symbolism of unclean contact, a
symbolism that antedates social order, sleeping beneath its
surface, quietly and vestigially, until it erupts again to
challenge civilized assumptions.14 Hence the monster's pathos as he
ponders his own existence as a being defiled: "was I then a
monster, a blot upon earth, from which all men fled and whom all
men disowned?" (115).

The note of helplessness in the monster's voice affirms his
defilement, for such a fate is impersonal and descends without
regard for responsibility.15 The monster's impurity is not the
monster's fault. It derives from an external, not an internal,
causality. We ought to inquire, then, into the causes of so
complete and arbitrary a defilement. Is the monster's misery
wholly the result of its creator's egoistic or masculine
presumptions? I think evidence to the contrary appears in a
startling remark the monster makes regarding his spurned
existence. Defending his essential innocence, he bitterly and
mockingly contrasts his being with the purer sort of his
persecutors: "Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings!
I, the miserable and abandoned, am an abortion to be spurned at,
kicked, and trampled on" (219).16 The important point here is not
merely that the monster equates spotlessness with virtue, but
that he describes himself as an "abortion," a term that places
the problem of defilement in a specifically biological -- and
sexual -- context. Again we find Shelley reducing suffering to
the body, but this time to emphasize its symbolic origin. The
monster's is a prenatal existence, an "imperfect animation" (228) suspended between
conception and {347} delivery. Shelley locates the objective
cause of his suffering in the domain of sexuality --
specifically female sexuality -- which appears, if the monster's
complaint is credible, to be the paradigm of
defilement.

Ricoeur speculates darkly on the archaic relation between
defilement and sexuality: "At the limit, the infant would be
regarded as born impure, contaminated from the beginning by the
parental seed, by the impurity of the maternal genital region,
and by the additional impurity of childbirth" (29). Through the
monster's defilement and its disgusting effects, Shelley
investigates the human curse of maculate conception. Being born
defiles being; this is the archaic wisdom that social norms
cannot accommodate.

One might object at this point that the monster's defilement
results, not from his mere creation (he was never really
"born"), but from his asexual creation by a solitary male
who usurps a woman's generative powers. The monster is an ugly
botch because he incarnates a male fantasy of creative
autonomy. And indeed, at a literal level this reading is hard
to contest. But there is a kind of sexual sub-symbolism that
betrays Shelley's deep allegiance to the body, even in the midst
of a fantastic tale of asexual creation. Ponder for instance
the bodily implications of the site of the monster's
conception. Frankenstein's "workshop of filthy creation" is a
"solitary chamber situated . . . at the top of the
house, and separated from all the apartments by a gallery and a
staircase" (50). A
psychoanalytic reading of this description might discover here a
symbolism of the female womb, displaced upward as in a dream,
accessible only through clandestine physical exertion. The
workshop is filthy and loathsome because symbolically it is
sexual -- a female space into which a masculine principle enters
to advance the unclean cause of procreation. If Frankenstein's
workshop is a womb-room, then his creative undertaking might not
be so exclusively masculine as it first appears. Shelley subtly
qualifies the apparent asexuality of Victor's creative
enterprise with a pervasive symbolism of sexual defilement that
quietly asserts the inescapability of bodily imperatives. "A
resistless and almost frantic impulse" (49) urges him on; his exertions
build up to "the most gratifying consummation" (47). Although Shelley unmasks
through such language the narcissistic origins of Frankenstein's
creative passions, she implies symbolically the dubiousness of
sexuality itself. Frankenstein in {348} his dirty workshop
symbolizes the sexual act in all its ambiguity, at once
gratifying and necessary for creating life, and yet the origin
too of defilement. Says Frankenstein, "often did my human
nature turn with loathing from my occupation, . . .
still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased" (50). Sexual desire fuels that
eagerness, and sexual contact, as Ricoeur suggests, breeds
defilement of the life to come. The sexual sub-symbolism of
Frankenstein's activity shows Shelley wrestling with the archaic
paradox of impure birth.

The monster incarnates this paradox, the conviction that the
sexual activity of creating life pollutes it. Not masculinity
but sexuality itself comes in for Shelley's profoundest
critique. But why should sexual contact be the cause of
defilement and the evil it symbolizes? Shelley's answer
conflates origins and ends, identifies life and death.
Immediately after "bestowing animation upon lifeless matter" (47), Frankenstein has a dream
that betrays the double movement of sexual desire. Envisioning
his beloved Elizabeth, he meets with a shock:

Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the
first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death;
her features appeared to change, and I thought I held the corpse
of my dead mother in my arms. (53)

A fantasy of sexual contact fades into an incestuous and
necrophilic nightmare. Sexual desire here breeds death --
specifically of the mother, origin of life. By identifying
Elizabeth and his mother, Frankenstein's dream identifies life
and death, revealing their common origin. To the extent that
they create life sexually, mothers are symbolically already
dead. Sexual contact defiles the life it engenders by bestowing
it upon lifeless matter. Frankenstein may want to discover an
alternative form of procreation, one that would allow him
ultimately to "renew life where death had apparently devoted the
body to corruption" (49), but
the lesson of Shelley's symbolism is that all such activity is
ambiguously and irreducibly sexual. And sexual contact taints
life with mortality; what originates in the life of the
mater ends inevitably in the inertness of matter. Hence
the revulsion inspired by the monster, who embodies the
defilement of being born to a material existence: "a mummy
again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that
wretch" (53).

The defilement of being born, inevitable outcome of sexual
contact: here we encounter in its fullness an archaic symbolism
that cannot be assimilated either to social norms or to the
{349} assumptions of "liberal feminism." The best a civilized
order can do, as Shelley so visibly demonstrates, is exclude it,
keep it at bay, repress all evidence of the sexual origin of
impurity. To the extent that Frankenstein recapitulates
the etiological drama of Paradise Lost, as Gilbert and Gubar suggest so
persuasively, it does so to reveal the way Milton mitigates the
paradox of impure birth.17 Death in his epic has origins
quite apart from those of life. Adam may lament, after his
fall, his "wonted Ornaments now soil'd and stain'd" [9.1076]; he may regret that
all his future progeny "Is propagated curse" [10.729].18 But the
cause of that impurity and curse is not sexual contact but moral
infidelity. Milton sublimates the symbolism of defilement by
situating it in a moral context that at least ostensibly
antedates and explains it. The "spotless innocence" (4. 318) of Adam and Eve
precedes their fall; as Milton takes pains to insist, so does
their sexual intimacy. And although Eve, through her moral lapse,
brings death into the world, its taint is only provisional, as
she herself discovers: "I who first brought Death on all, am
grac't / The source of life" (11. 168-69). Life at its
highest for Milton is not a strictly bodily phenomenon, which
means that a material defilement can be morally purged. Such a
sublimation of impurity replaces sexual origins with moral ones
that translate easily into social norms. Witness Raphael's
parting admonition to our fallen parents, "add only / Deeds to
thy knowledge answerable" (12. 581-82). For Milton the
Fall occasions an impure sexuality, not vice versa.

Shelley recapitulates his story not merely, as Gilbert and Gubar suggest, to expose its
patriarchal assumptions, but also to recover the archaic
symbolism it sublimates. Her new Adam, the wretched monster,
resists assimilation to those social norms that descend from a
moral interpretation of defilement.19 More importantly, he asserts, in
his very hideousness, the fatal materiality of all life, its
mortal intimacy with death. Shelley's Adam is thus more man
than Milton's, a creature of human, not divine, procreation. An
impure birth is the given paradox of this existence, a tragic
paradox that, in Shelley's view, social norms and the moralities
that found them arise to repress. Perhaps now we are in a
position to understand, partly anyway, why the female characters
of Frankenstein are such an insipid lot. With a few
exceptions, they fall into two categories: virgins, who are all
living angels, and mothers, who are all dead. The "selfless,
boring nurturers and victims" [Johnson 7] that so irritate
feminist critics pos- {350} sess another quality as well:
sexual innocence. Women like Caroline Beaufort who have lost
that innocence through bearing and bringing up children are
noticeable in this narrative for their absence. We need to
account for this striking distinction. Why should Shelley
divide the feminine into living maidens and the dead
matriarchs?

The symbolic converse of defilement is radical innocence -- in
sexual terms, virginity. The living and innocent women who
appear to serve as Shelley's feminine ideal are untainted by
sexual contact. Elizabeth, Justine, Sophie, and Agatha all play
the ethereal part of Ideal Woman. Yet none is sexually
experienced; the first two take their spotlessness to the
grave. Children of impure birth, they have not yet renewed that
impurity. Their ideal status rests upon their sexual
innocence. Ricoeur reminds us that an archaic symbolism
identifies the virgin as the undefiled: "virginity and
spotlessness are as closely bound together as sexuality and
contamination" (29). Shelley's perfect women remain
biologically immaculate. They are insipid because they are not
really characters at all, but symbols of a life yet
uncontaminated by materiality.

The word "innocent" appears so often to describe the unlucky
Justine that it becomes a kind of praenomen, proof of her
purity. And Elizabeth, from her first appearance as "a child
fairer than pictured cherub" (235, 1831 edition) to her fatal
exit as "the best hope and purest creature of the earth" (193), preserves her sexual
innocence beyond even the event of her marriage. Both of these
characters die before becoming mothers and bringing death into
the world. Preservation of their purity depends upon its
absolute negation. It is appropriate, then, that in each case
the monster is the ultimate cause of death. In a kind of
matter/anti-matter collision, the defiled kills the undefiled.
The monster's intimation of his motives for murder is in this
regard dim but suggestive. Arranging for Justine to be accused
as a murderess, the monster makes this odd remark: "The crime
had its source in her; be hers the punishment" (251, 1831 edition). As woman,
Justine is metaphorically responsible for the monster's impurity
and its murderous effects. As virgin, she is bodily pure enough
to atone for the monster's defilement. Like Elizabeth after
her, she becomes a sacrificial victim in a displaced rite of
purification. Both die to atone for the impersonal crime of
defilement. The monster's promise to be with Frankenstein on
his wedding night {351} similarly augurs a ritual atonement for
impurity. Elizabeth dies spotless, even after having undergone
the sacrament of marriage, which works to legitimate sexual
contact, contain its contamination. The insipid women of
Shelley's novel serve less to exemplify an ideal of femininity
than to advance a symbolism of defilement toward resolution in a
displaced ritual of atonement.

But what about that other category of female character in
Frankenstein, the mother, who with impressive celerity
meets her death? This remarkable characteristic of Shelley's
narrative has been noticed before, and explained as a symptom of
Frankenstein's own need to perpetuate the death of the mother
(and, indeed, of motherhood in general) in order to sustain his
solipsistic and brutally masculine will to creative autonomy.
Frankenstein thus becomes -- as male creator -- responsible for
the deaths of all the mothers in the novel, soliciting the
feminist conclusion that the masculine imagination, at least in
Western tradition, is hostile to woman. Margaret Homans puts
the point succinctly: "the novel is about the collision between
androcentric and gynocentric theories of creation, a collision
that results in the denigration of maternal childbearing through
its circumvention by male creation."20 (113). While this reading remains
true to the details of the narrative and uncovers a tension
certainly present therein, it fails to consider the possibility
that "maternal childbearing" is itself an ambiguous ideal. The
more profound tension Shelley wrestles with arises out of seeing
the mother simultaneously as bearer of life and breeder of
death.22
Mothers in Frankenstein are categorically dead because
their biological function is primordially defiled. Their
precipitous demise thus reiterates the tragic paradox of
material existence: that, in the words of William Blake, "life lives upon
death."

Mary Shelley's own life
as child and mother bore ample witness to this paradox. It has
become almost obligatory for critics of Frankenstein to
cite the long list of deaths that dogged the early life of its
author: her mother Mary
Wollstonecraft expiring eleven days after Mary's birth; her
half-sister Fanny Imlay
poisoning herself and referring obliquely in her suicide note to
her illegitimacy; Percy's first wife Harriet Westbrook dying
pregnant by another at the time of her suicide; and finally,
Mary's first daughter passing quietly two weeks after her
premature birth.22 All of these deaths implicate the
mother by exaggerating the proximity of life's origin and end.
I am not trying to suggest that {352} this biographical context
accounts directly for the identification of death and motherhood
in Frankenstein, but rather that it urges us to
interrogate this fatal pattern for its psychological
implications. What we will discover, I believe, is that Shelley
represents motherhood as she does as much to evade its sinister
imperatives as to criticize an androcentric theory of
creation.

It is interesting to note in this regard that Shelley's
revisions of her novel for republication in 1831 significantly
enhance the role of Frankenstein's mother in the drama of his
development. In the 1818 edition, Caroline Beaufort has no
palpable existence as mother until Frankenstein mentions her in
conjunction with Elizabeth, his intended bride: "I have often
heard my mother say, that she was at that time the most
beautiful child that she had ever seen" (29), a circumstance that
"determined my mother to consider Elizabeth as my future wife"
(29). Oddly, Frankenstein's
mother, and not he himself, imagines her replacement as the
object of his desire; no sooner does a "mother" emerge in this
text than she is eclipsed by a "future wife." The mother has no
real existence in the 1818 edition because her sexual fertility
assures her own fatality. Shelley softens this dim view of
motherhood in revision by extensively developing the character
of Caroline Beaufort. And the result, as Mary Poovey has skillfully shown, is to
transform the ideological bias of the novel; where
Frankenstein's mother was previously absent, her emphatic
presence now initiates a proto-Victorian celebration of
domesticity.23

Beneath the surface of this revision in the interest of social
norms, however, still lingers the tragic paradox of impure
birth. For the rehabilitation of Caroline Beaufort has as its
psychological correlative a denial of the biological function of
maternity. In the famous introduction to the 1831 edition [Introduction 1] Shelley adds an
account of the genesis of her novel that severely qualifies its
effort to accommodate the social norm of the nurturing mother.
The details of the account are familiar: Shelley's story comes
to her in a dream, which as Homans deftly describes it, is "a
dream moreover that is about the coming true of a dream" (112); Frankenstein, "the pale
student of unhallowed arts" (228), realizes his lifelong
ambition of animating dead matter. But we need to attend as
closely to what this dream leaves out as to what it includes.
For it ends with an encounter of uncanny implications.
Frankenstein withdraws to rest, only to be disturbed a moment
later: "He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes;
behold, {353} the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening
his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but
speculative eyes" (228).
Surely Homans is right to read this scene as dramatizing the
"conception" (109) of the book
that Shelley herself describes with the phrase "my hideous
progeny" (229).

But we must not overlook the implications of Shelley's implied
identification with the sinister creator Frankenstein. If
Shelley's dream is the original of Frankenstein's, then the
fantasy it liberates is more hers than his. The terms of that
fantasy, a creature returning to and innocently observing the
site of its conception (for Frankenstein's bed is the symbolic
equivalent of his "workshop of filthy creation" [1.3.6]), resemble nothing more
than a primal scene -- with one major difference. Here there is
no mother. Shelley's dream announces a fantasy of female
independence from the biological fate of motherhood. This
fantasy, origin of all that follows, conditions even
Frankenstein's usurpation of creative power. The only
psychological solution, it appears, to the paradox of impure
birth is to deny female participation in the defilement of
sexual contact. So although the monster's impurity originates
sexually, Shelley's narrative manifests that origin only
symbolically. A place and not a person bears the burden of
female sexuality. Frankenstein's will to creative autonomy is
underwritten by a fantasy of female exemption from the contagion
of sexual contact. The monster's defilement is thus doubly
onerous: not only has sexuality polluted his existence, but in
his hideousness he lives alone; he has a face only a mother
could love -- and, alas, he has no mother.

This absence of the mother appears, then, to be susceptible to a
variety of explanations. It might be the result, as feminists
conventionally argue, of Frankenstein's rage for creative
autonomy. Or it might be, alternatively, symptomatic of a
repression of the mother by Shelley herself.24 Could it be
that Shelley's autonomy as a creator, as much as Victor
Frankenstein's, depends upon the elision of motherhood from the
creative enterprise? Feminist critics implicitly exonerate
Shelley from such psychological tensions by reading her
narrative as a cool intellectual critique of patriarchy, which
at one level it emphatically is. But on another level it
betrays an intense discomfort with the lot of the mother as
origin of life given to death.25 Shelley represses this biological
fate and substitutes for it the labors of artistic creation.
Her "hideous progeny" [Introduction 12], a work of
art, is not subject to death, as were her {354} children.26Frankenstein lives today beyond all mortal touch.
Repressing the mother allows Shelley to control the creative
enterprise rather than be controlled by it. This evasion of
biological fate is the condition of creative freedom, for as we
have already seen, the monster turns destructive precisely
because he cannot maintain such an evasion. Shelley published
her novel anonymously in part to reinforce this repression;
where once was a mother is now a nameless creator.

The presence of such a repression would be a difficult claim to
sustain were it not that the mother reappears in
Frankenstein in strange and sublimated ways. After the
death of Caroline Beaufort, which in the 1818 edition occurs
with remarkable swiftness, the mother's existence is wholly
figural; she becomes a mere image of a vanished presence.
Shelley somewhat diminishes this ghostliness in revision, but in
the earliest published version of the narrative Caroline
Beaufort remains primarily a figment of the imagination, a
figuration of the maternal. Her first substantial appearance is
a disappearance, the quick and fatal consequence of scarlet
fever. She returns, however, as a figure that haunts
Frankenstein's dreams and presides over his father's household.
When Frankenstein comes home to Geneva after an absence of six
years, having been recalled by the news of his brother William's
death, the first thing he notices upon entering his father's
house is a painting of his lost mother:

I gazed on the picture of my mother, which stood over the
mantlepiece. It was a historical subject, painted at my
father's desire, and represented Caroline Beaufort in an agony
of despair, kneeling by the coffin of her dead father. Her garb
was rustic and her cheek pale, but there was an air of dignity
and beauty that hardly permitted the sentiment of pity. (73)

After her death, Frankenstein's mother persists in a purely
figural existence.

The conventional feminist implications of this existence are
clear enough: the fact that this picture was painted at the
urging of a "father's desire" suggests that a woman's body has
been appropriated to become an object for masculine idealizing.
But Caroline Beaufort's is a macabre kind of beauty. This
painting emphasizes, on a sublime scale, the proximity of the
mother to death. If we approach it in psychological terms, as
the figural effect of repression, then it suggests a resistance
on Shelley's part to the tragic implications of motherhood. She
cannot approach or present it directly because the mother is a
fatal creator and her labors are tied to time. So she
sublimates the mother, recreating {355} her on a heroic and
ideal scale. The miniature of the dead William that hangs
beneath his mother's sublime image only reinforces Shelley's
point: motherhood creates a lineage of death that art recreates
by idealizing. The apparent autonomy of the artist --
particularly the female artist -- comes for Shelley at the cost
of repressing the mother, whose fatal influence is purged
through an idealizing art.

Shelley thus controls the mother by recreating her in idealized,
artistic terms, purifying her image from the defilement she
originates. Nowhere is this idealizing function of art clearer
than in the monster's encounter with another image of Caroline
Beaufort. After murdering little William, the monster notices a
miniature around the child's neck: "It was a portrait of a most
lovely woman. In spite of my malignity, it softened and
attracted me. For a few moments I gazed with delight on her dark
eyes, fringed by deep lashes, and her lovely lips" (139). The ideal beauty of the
mother's image both charms and enrages the monster, who senses a
perpetual separation from it. This artistic idealization
depends ultimately upon repressing the more fatal aspects of the
mother, which emerge indirectly in the use to which the monster
puts the miniature. For the image of Caroline Beaufort becomes
the evidence that seals the fate of the innocent Justine. The
figural mother returns to her foster child, and the fatal
causality that links them reveals the repressed curse of
impurity that artistic creation works to idealize.

Born free we are born fated, fettered to a dying animal. It is
the ambition of Romantic
art to loosen those mortal ties and liberate the human.
Frankenstein is often read as an early and withering
critique of Romantic idealism that unmasks its demoralizing
effects.27
But in its repression of biological fate -- the fate of
motherhood -- it participates in the very idealizing it seeks to
discredit. Jerome McGann has taught us to be wary of all such
idealizing: "The idea that poetry, or even consciousness, can
set one free of the ruins of history and culture is the grand
illusion of every Romantic poet."28 To the extent that Shelley looks
to art to set her free from the ruins of motherhood she becomes
the purveyor of a Romantic idealism.

But Shelley's will to creative autonomy, like Frankenstein's,
cannot wholly escape the taint of mortality. By repressing the
mother she too attempts a higher kind of creation than the
merely biological. A fantasy of female independence from bio-
{355} logical constraints thus supports her own artistic
enterprise, just as it had her mother's "liberal feminism." A
criticism that views Frankenstein as her "feminist novel"
without examining its psychological investments and evasions
remains blind to the a ambiguities of its ostensible polemic.
For in it Shelley swerves not only away from the standard of her
mother's Vindication but also
from the fate of motherhood. In this she leaves herself open to
her own complaint against her mother: that the facts of the
body cannot be denied. Shelley's "feminism," if historically it
can be so called, grows uneasily out of certain fundamental
idealizings, even illusions, a situation she owns up to in her
1831 introduction. Describing why she feels so strongly about
her "hideous progeny" Frankenstein she points explicitly
to its idealism: "I have an affection for it, for it was the
offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words
which found no true echo in my heart" (229). However sanguine this
memory of the good old days with Percy, it suggests that, to
Shelley's mind at least, Frankenstein remains in some
essential way uninformed by the fact of mortality. Not the
creator but the creature knows better the facts of life -- and
of death: "Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest
remorse, where can I find rest but in death?" (220). Not art but death alone
resolves the tragic paradox of impure birth.

3. Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary
Shelley, 1814-1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana
Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) 2:
557. That Mary Shelley's political commitments were largely a
personal matter is revealed in the sentence that follows the one
quoted: "At every risk I have befriended and supported victims
to the social system, but I do not make a boast"
(emphasis mine).

4. For a survey of contemporary feminisms, see
Alison M . Jagger, Feminist Politics and Human Nature
(Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983). Jagger divides
contemporary feminism into four groups: Liberal, Marxist,
socialist, and radical. Wollstonecraft's position is an early
and definitive example of liberal feminism, which Jagger
describes as follows: "the liberal feminist position seems to
be that male and female natures are identical -- or to put it
more accurately, that there is no such thing as male and female
nature: there is only human nature and that has no sex"
(37).

5. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston, 2nd ed. (New York:
Norton, I988), p. 7.
All further references will be to this edition.

6. William Veeder argues to the contrary that
the women of Frankenstein are complex and interesting
characters. But his analysis, though subtle, does not ring true
to my own experience. See his detailed and perceptive
discussion in chapter 6 of his Mary Shelley and
Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny (U. Of Chicago Press,
1986).

8. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. James
Rieger (New York: Bobbs-Merrill 1974), p. 14. All further
references will be to this edition.

9. For an especially astute discussion of these
themes, see Mary Poovey, The Proper
Lady and the Woman Writer, chapter 4.

10.Anne K.
Mellor, for instance, argues cogently that Victor
Frankenstein represents a patriarchal society that uses
technologies of science and laws of the polis to manipulate,
control, and repress women. See Mary Shelley: Her Life Her
Fiction, Her Monsters, Chapter 5.

11 It is for this reason that I cannot conclude
with Veeder that androgyny is a human ideal that
Frankenstein, at its deepest, pursues. Androgyny may be
a kind of ideal for Shelley personally, but over and over again
her novel exposes its dubiousness.

12. Mellor is representative: "Mary Shelley,
doubtless inspired by her mother's A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman, specifically portrays the consequences of a
social construction of gender which values men over women" (Mary
Shelley, p. 115). Shelley might
dispute the complete equality of gender implied by such a
statement.

14. Writes Ricoeur, "The invincible bond
between Vengeance and defilement is anterior to any institution,
any intention, any decree; it is so primitive that it is
anterior even to the representation of an avenging god" (30).
Julia Kristeva provides a frankly feminist discussion of
defilement in Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(Columbia U. Press, 1982). Kristeva's semiological method is of
little use to us here, for it reduces defilement to a kind of
containment strategy aimed at maintaining the differentiation of
the subject and thus its confinement in the symbolic order. For
an examination of defilement as a perceived breach of order,
"matter out of place," see Mary Douglas, Purity and
Danger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

15. Ricoeur again: "the inventory of faults
under the regime of defilement is vaster on the side of
happenings in the world in the degree to which it is narrower on
the side of the intentions of the agent" (27).

16. As Mellor
reminds us (Mary Shelley, p. 62), it is Percy who suggested
the word "abortion" to describe the monster. Mary Shelley
clearly approved, since she never tampered with it; it is of a
piece with the bodily orientation of her whole symbolism for the
monster.

17. See Gilbert and
Gubar, pp. 213-47. Gilbert and Gubar approach
Frankenstein from a primarily intertextual perspective,
interpreting it as an act of "bibliogenesis" in which Shelley
confronts but cannot overcome her oppressive male precursors, in
particular Milton.

19. Ricoeur yet again proves useful: "the
world of defilement is a world anterior to the division between
the ethical and the physical. Ethics is mingled with the
physics of suffering, while suffering is surcharged with ethical
meanings" (31).

21. In a searching study of motherhood in
Frankenstein from a biographical perspective, U. C. Knoepflmacher notes that Shelley
equates femininity with a passivity so extreme that it is best
figured by the death of the mother. Knoepflmacher traces
Shelley's ambivalence about the feminine back to her childhood
lack of a maternal model, observing that "Frankenstein is a novel of
omnipresent fathers and absent mothers." See "Thoughts on
the Aggression of Daughters," in The Endurance of
Frankenstein, pp. 88-119.

22. For a full and intelligent accounting of
Mary Shelley's life and the many deaths surrounding it, see
Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).

24.Marc A.
Rubenstein approaches this position, but interprets the
repression of the mother in purely biographical terms: "the
exclusion of women from Frankenstein seems a direct
rebuke of Mary Wollstonecraft." See "My Accursed Origin: the
Search for the Mother in Frankenstein," Studies in
Romanticism15 (1976): 165-94, 187.

25.Ellen Moers
suggests that Frankenstein is "most interesting, most
powerful and most feminine" in its presentation of "the motif of
revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread,
and flight surrounding birth and its consequences" (81). Moers does not, however, ponder
the implication of this revulsion beyond the biographical. See
"Female Gothic," The Endurance of Frankenstein, pp.
77-87.

26. Consider in this regard the strange dream
Shelley recorded in her journal soon after the death of her
firstborn: "Dream that my little baby came to life again --
that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it before the
fire & it lived. Awake and find no baby" (Journals,
70) -- a sinister parody of Adam's dream in Milton's
paradise.